What Kind of Language Is That to Use in The Times?

Dutch Schultz was a gangster you did not want to anger. And Meyer Berger of The Times had infuriated him.

A profile Mr. Berger wrote in 1933 about the Bronx bootlegger called him a “pushover for a blonde.” Outraged, Schultz confronted Mr. Berger in person to demand an explanation for the slander.

“But it’s the truth isn’t it?” the reporter asked.

“Yes,” the gangster replied, “but what kind of language is that to use in The New York Times?”

This marvelous tale — told in Mr. Berger’s 1959 obituary, then by Gay Talese in “The Kingdom and the Power” (1969), then by Russell Baker in his Sunday Observer column in 1985 — epitomizes the bind in which The Times often gets itself when writing about the sexual crimes and misadventures of the powerful.

What threshold permits the press to examine the private lives of public figures, anyway? There is no right answer; only stumbling attempts to find a compromise to suit each discrete indiscreet circumstance. Matters grow tougher when it comes to the treatment of truly private citizens, like Monica Lewinsky or Donna Rice, who are embroiled in a scandal.

The Times is in an especially awkward position because it holds itself as a exemplar of decorum and civility.

“There can certainly be some tension here,” Philip B. Corbett, The Times’s standards editor, said. “On the one hand, we don’t want to deprive readers of newsworthy information, and we don’t think of them as delicate creatures who need to be shielded from unsavory goings-on. On the other hand, lurid gossip or mere sensationalism is not really what readers come to us for.”

Times reporters and editors donned kid gloves in 1884 to describe charges — first reported in The Buffalo Evening Telegraph — that Gov. Grover Cleveland of New York, the Democratic candidate for president, had fathered a child out of wedlock with Maria Halpin of Buffalo.

It seemed beyond dispute that Mr. Cleveland had paid some child support money to Mrs. Halpin, but his partisans spun that as an act of gallantry by a bachelor in a case where the true paternity was unclear. (The implication that Mrs. Halpin had numerous beaus could not have been lost on contemporary audiences.)

Like recent scandals, this one had legs because it apparently exposed a vein of hypocrisy on the part of a candidate whose rectitude was being trumpeted as unimpeachable. In The Judge’s famous cartoon, “Another Voice for Cleveland,” the governor, “Grover the Good,” is shown recoiling from an infant’s cry of “Pa!”

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Gov. Grover Cleveland's paternity scandal was the laughingstock of the nation in 1884. Not so much at The Times.CreditLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

But Times readers did not get the same story that was consuming readers of The Evening Telegraph and The Chicago Tribune, among others.

Not until Adolph S. Ochs purchased The Times in 1896 did the philosophy take hold of a news report that was independent of its proprietors’ political leanings.

The Times of 1884 was an unapologetically partisan newspaper. Having broken with its founding tradition in the Republican camp, it wanted nothing to do with that party’s candidate, Senator James G. Blaine of Maine, for whom it expressed deep contempt. It sided with the Mugwumps, reform-minded Republicans who supported Governor Cleveland.

So it tailored its coverage of the paternity question accordingly.

One of the first mentions of the scandal (or “alleged scandal,” as The Times called it) came on Aug. 7, when a news article labeled Governor Cleveland’s accusers “carrion crows” in the lead paragraph. Hmmm. Not the neutral language of news gathering.

A mere five days later, the newspaper declared that the scandal had been “swept away” and “speedily settled,” thanks to a report compiled by 16 “independent Republicans.” Nowhere in the piece was there any explicit mention of what, exactly, the scandal had been.

“We have not thought it necessary or proper to repeat the charges against Gov. Cleveland in detail,” the Republicans were quoted in the paper as saying, “nor to present in full the evidence by which they have been disproved.”

A generation later, however, the landscape had changed completely. In May 1987, former Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, was spotted by journalists from The Miami Herald outside his Washington townhouse with a woman who was not his wife.

A key element in the scandal involved a Times Magazine cover story on May 3 of that year. Written by E. J. Dionne Jr., then the chief national political correspondent, “Gary Hart, the Elusive Front-Runner” was a nuanced, closely observed profile of nearly 4,700 words. What was remembered was a short paragraph deep down in the story:

“Follow me around. I don’t care,” he says firmly, about the womanizing question. “I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.”

As “Grover the Good” was to American politics in the late 19th century, so Tiger Woods was to American sports in the early 21st century — seemingly unassailable and therefore peculiarly vulnerable. Then, early in the morning of Nov. 27, 2009, two days after The National Enquirer published a story claiming that he was seeing a woman to whom he was not married, Mr. Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant and tree outside his house in Windermere, Fla.

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Tiger Woods waited almost three months to acknowledge what had happened.

The Times’s initial account made no mention of the Enquirer story, though it presciently noted that Mr. Woods was “as zealous about guarding his private life as he is about winning Grand Slam titles.” Far too zealous, it turned out, for an era in which the arc of a story was no longer controlled by big, deliberative, reticent news organizations like The Times. Called on to be forthright about his philandering, Mr. Woods waited to do so until February.

As the story unfolded, Times readers saw very little of the name of the woman whom The Enquirer had linked to Mr. Woods in the first place. It did not appear on our website until the Global Sports Forum of Dec. 28, when Jean-Philippe Leclaire, the editor in chief of L’Equipe magazine, wondered what would have happened had she approached reporters with a story in October.

Would you have printed the story? Not so sure. We had to wait for this 2:25 a.m. car crash to open the gates. Now, every woman with a Tiger story seems welcome. But before, Tiger was considered and sold, not only by his sponsors, but also by us, the news media, as an untouchable icon. Instead of just blaming his entourage, it would be more clever to ask ourselves where are our limits? Why is Tiger now fed to the lions, every aspect of his private life good enough to print, when before it would have been taboo?

That prompted Richard Williams of The Guardian to say: “I keep thinking of Jack Kennedy. Everybody on the campaign bus knew, nobody told.” It was clear from his remark that he didn’t think that would ever be the case again. But it still might take The Times a few days after everyone else to jump on the bus.

Our standards editor, Mr. Corbett, again: “It’s probably harder than ever to strike a balance, when so much that once was private is now all over social media or featured on reality TV. We just try to focus on what’s significant and newsworthy. We’re not going to run something just because it’s lurid or titillating — but we’re also not going to shy away from a sensitive topic if it really is newsworthy for our readers.”

‘Pushover’ or ‘Weakness’?

Though the “pushover for a blonde” story was a newsroom legend in the days before electronic searches were possible, it is difficult now to corroborate it. The closest I have come so far is this Jan. 22, 1933, profile of Dutch Schultz:

Schultz has far less of the legendary gangster glamour about him than most of the so-called public enemies. His weakness for blondes is the open jest of his friends as well as his enemies, and he cannot hold his liquor nearly as well as most of the others of his stripe.

The piece might have been written by Mr. Berger, who was on the staff at the time. It certainly evinces his flair. And it surely would have infuriated any self-respecting hoodlum.